Child Sexual Exploitation

Debate between Gavin Shuker and Baroness Blackwood of North Oxford

Tuesday 13th November 2012 Commons Chamber

[Nicola Blackwood]

I thank my hon. Friend for his point. Although we must indentify where there have been failings in the system and root out systems that are not working, it is important that we do not vilify places that take action and bring perpetrators to justice. If we do that, we will put off local authorities and police from taking these cases to court.

Government can only do so much. It is generally accepted that local services, led by the local safeguarding children boards and police, have to lead on responding to child sexual exploitation. But before they can do that, they are going to have to accept that this issue affects them and is worthy of being prioritised in the current economic climate. There are still local authorities that do not think this affects their area. I do not cast any stones. I cannot express the shock I had when the news about the Oxford case emerged, and I do not think I was alone. Organised sexual exploitation on this scale was, to me, something that happened somewhere else—in inner cities with gangs or in cities with grinding poverty. What is more, to me, it did not happen to local girls; it happened to trafficked girls from Cambodia, eastern Europe or west Africa—or just any other place. What I have learned during this process is that it is not so much that it is everywhere, as that it could happen anywhere. The deputy Children’s Commissioner, who is halfway through a two-year inquiry into group and gang-associated child sexual exploitation, said in evidence to the Select Committee:

“what I am uncovering is that the sexual exploitation of children is happening all over the country. As one police officer who was a lead in a very big investigation in a very lovely, leafy, rural part of the country said to me, there is not a town, village or hamlet in which children are not being sexually exploited.”

Peter Davies, the chief executive of the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Centre confirmed her view, although I have to say that he thought that hamlets might be pushing it.

In that context, it is not enough to have plans, regulations and guidance pushed down from government—we had that in 2009 and it did not work. What we need to know is that effective multi-agency teams are on the ground, trained to recognise risk factors and able to pursue not only prevention and early intervention, but investigation and prosecution. This is what the Government have been trying to encourage since last year, but it turns out that it is quite hard to track local progress on the ground.

[Gavin Shuker (Luton South) (Lab/Co-op)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that one way in which the Government might be able to fulfil their role in this process is by putting a reporting requirement on local safeguarding children boards so that this evidence is collated nationally, not just locally?

[Nicola Blackwood]

It is as though the hon. Gentleman has read my mind; I will be coming to that point later.

When CEOP undertook its “Out of Mind, Out of Sight” report 18 months ago, it received only 13 responses from local authorities—that is out of 154 councils in England. The report was clear: local safeguarding children boards were not fulfilling their statutory responsibilities; they needed to improve their ability to recognise the risks in this area so that they could intervene early; and multi-agency working, particularly through co-located units, was the key to ensuring that data and soft intelligence did not fall between the cracks and did not succumb to overly cautious data protection practices, especially in the NHS and in social services.

The most recent survey of local authority activity that I could find comes not from any official statistic, but from unpublished research by Barnardo’s. In an August 2012 review of its “Cut them free” campaign, it found that although 107 out of 154 local authorities had signed up to tackle child sexual exploitation, few of the 31 local authorities that responded in detail had detailed, well developed strategies. Most local authorities were still planning strategies, data collection, training and specialist service provision, although most were planning to have them in place by the end of 2013. I honestly do not think that that shows a lack of will; it is an indication that this is a very recent strategy and that they are starting from a very low base.

However, it is almost impossible for us to assess the scale of the problem or the consistency of service provision without having a robust policy of data collation and collection. I do not think we can assess the risks, map the need or properly hold our local authorities to account. I would add a caveat: victims are often moved between cities, so if we are going to have any kind of data collection, it needs to be consistent between local authorities, because we do not want victims to fall through the cracks when they go from one local authority to another.

We have already seen data sharing causing too many barriers. One key problem regularly raised with me is the failure of professionals to share data about victims that could have given a full picture of what was happening. I understand, up to a point, that discerning such insidious underlying abuse beneath a bad girl image might have been a leap too far, given superficial behaviour, but what I still find difficult is that a big source of confusion lay in the fact that obvious indicators in data about victims, such as repeated missing episodes, unexplained injuries, sexually transmitted diseases and unwanted pregnancies, petty offences and truancy were not shared between agencies. That meant that no one even had a chance to put the picture together and discern a pattern of abuse, free from judgment about whether some 14-year-old was simply making bad choices.